about - anna tzakou

Anna Tzakou is a theatre maker, landscape performance artist, and practice-based researcher based in Athens, Greece. Her work brings together mindfulness, improvisation, embodied dramaturgy, and site-specific performance to explore questions of identity, home, belonging, and human–more-than-human relations. Since 2012, she has been developing Geopoetics, a contemplative landscape performance practice grounded in deep listening, embodied presence, and the poetics of place.

Artistic Statement

My work is grounded in a process-based contemplative creative practice of deep listening, kinesthetic delight, mindfulness, awareness, and togetherness.
I understand landscape as an event of interrelationship.
I work with meditation in action, instant improvisation, and writing performance.
I create non-linear embodied dramaturgies as contemplative containers.
I am fascinated by moments when reality is revealed as a poetic dream of presence, a vast cosmic reservoir of deep-time experience.
My research brings together landscape, place, mindfulness, and performance practices.
Looking toward Indigenous Knowledge Systems and understandings of indigeneity grounded in relationships with land, ancestors, elders, and non-human kin, I work toward feminist and post-colonial performance frameworks that challenge colonized ways of understanding place.
My practice is informed by Dharma Art, Body-Mind Centering®, Grotowski-based actor training, Barbara Dilley’s Contemplative Dance Practice, the Six Viewpoints, Moment Work, and Anna Halprin’s practice in nature.
Performance as a way of listening deeply to the world and our place within it.

Biography

Anna Tzakou is a theatre maker, landscape performance artist, and practice-based researcher situated in Athens, Greece. Since 2012, she has been developing Geopoetics, a site-specific and walking performance practice through which she creates works in urban and natural landscapes.

She holds a PhD in Performance Practice from the University of Exeter (UK), where she completed her doctoral research, Geopoetics: A Mindfulness (Sati) Site-Specific Performance Practice. She also holds an MFA in Contemporary Performance from Naropa University (Colorado, USA) and a BFA in Acting from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece).

She has worked as an independent creator and collaborator with major cultural institutions including the Greek National Opera, Onassis Stegi, the Athens Epidaurus Festival, Athens Biennale, and the Onassis Foundation Cavafy Archive.

Through Geopoetics, she has received commissions from the Experimental Stage -1 of the National Theatre of Greece, the Athens Epidaurus Festival, Dimitria Festival of Thessaloniki, and Pafos2017 European Capital of Culture, and has been supported by grants from the Hellenic Ministry of Culture.

Anna has been awarded Fulbright and Onassis Foundation scholarships. Her artistic and academic research has been published in Greece, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and presented at international conferences, universities, festivals, and research platforms across Europe and North America.

Since 2013, she has taught acting, directing, and contemporary performance practices in academic, artistic, and community contexts throughout Greece and Europe. She has taught workshops at the University of Exeter (UK), Fontys University of Applied Sciences (NL), and the Dutch Art Institute (NL), and taught courses at the University of the Peloponnese (GR) between 2019 and 2023.

For a full CV send an email at info@annatzakou-geopoetics.com.